A Rare Moment of Bipartisan Disbelief
But really, who among us hasn’t inadvertently shared secret plans about an imminent military strike on Yemen with the editor in chief of The Atlantic?
Wait, what?
Occasionally, Washington gets hit with one of those stories. The kind that halts the busy company town in its divided tracks. Everyone seems to unite, at least briefly, in disbelief. A single dominant topic comes along and crushes everything, and all the rest is suddenly beside the point. It rarely happens in this day and age of competing social-media ecosystems. But yesterday was one of those days. Even Elon Musk could barely crack the headlines.
The group gobsmacking began shortly after noon, when The Atlantic dropped a bombshell story headlined “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.” Spoiler alert: The story is about how the Trump administration accidentally texted the author its war plans.
You’ve likely heard about this by now. Said author—The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg—somehow was added to an extremely sensitive discussion, on the nongovernmental messaging app Signal, about a planned U.S. attack on the Houthis in Yemen. The chat, seemingly initiated by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, appeared to include Secretary of State Marco Rubio (delineated by his initials, “MAR”), the vice president (“JD Vance”), the defense secretary (“Pete Hegseth”), the Treasury secretary (“Scott B”), Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (“TG”), and other Trump-administration principals. Presumably, the discussion was not meant to include Goldberg, or “JG,” as he was identified.
This was, to say the least, an extraordinary security breach caused by uncommon recklessness at the tippy-top of the national defense hierarchy. It also constituted a major scoop by The Atlantic, so before I go any further, I should disclose that I work for The Atlantic. Yay The Atlantic!
[David A. Graham: But her emails?]
The news spread fast across the capital. Jaw-dropping appeared to be the dominant go-to descriptor. Trump critics promptly circulated old statements from Republicans railing against Hillary Clinton for having a private email account when she was secretary of state. Users on X resurfaced a clip of Hegseth speaking on Fox News about President Joe Biden “flippantly” handing classified documents, and a post from Gabbard promising that “any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law.” (The White House has said that no classified information was shared on the Signal thread.)
Within a few hours, the fiasco had been christened “Signalgate,” proving that no matter how much Washington changes, the un-clever naming construction of its scandals remains stuck in the Watergate era.
How could such a stupefying breach take place? How was this error not immediately discovered and “JG” not swiftly removed? Who did Waltz and his colleagues think “JG” actually was? The best running theory seems to be Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative. Or perhaps someone mistook Jeffrey Goldberg for Jeff Goldblum’s character in Independence Day. Also: Why don’t defense secretaries ever text me their war plans?
“You’re saying that they had what?” Donald Trump replied when he was asked by reporters about The Atlantic’s access to the channel, a few hours after the story came out. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said, a bit surprisingly. “I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic,” he added, less surprisingly.
[Listen: Jeffrey Goldberg on the group chat that broke the internet]
I might have been misreading Trump’s expression, but for a split second, he seemed genuinely taken aback by what he was told. There was something familiar and maybe a bit comforting about the universal sense of shock: What took place yesterday was a rare pop-up scandal in the Trump era that brought bipartisan recognition of a massive mistake having been committed.
Soon enough, MAGA world would regain its hostile posture and proceed with its requisite smearing of the messenger. Trump repeated his false claim that The Atlantic is going out of business. Hegseth called Goldberg a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist” (exactly the kind of guy you’d want to be sharing war plans with).
This morning, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, claiming that “Goldberg is well-known for his sensationalist spin,” denied that war plans had been shared. A prime-time chyron on Fox News last night offered a friendly public-service reminder: “We’ve all texted the wrong person before.”
But even Leavitt admitted error at least to a degree, stating that the White House was investigating “how Goldberg’s number was inadvertently added to the thread.” The Signal chat group “appears to be authentic,” the White House National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes said in a statement yesterday, confirming what he’d told Goldberg for the story. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson assured reporters that Team Trump would “make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
[Read: Trump goes after the messenger]
“Everyone should know better than putting top-secret war plans on an unclassified phone,” Republican Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska told CNN. “Period. There is no excuse.”
“Sounds like a huge screwup. I mean, is there any other way to describe it?” Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas said when asked about the mishap. Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s former transportation secretary, agreed, though he chose another way to describe it: “This is the highest level of fuckup imaginable,” he wrote on X.
Hillary Clinton did not miss her chance to weigh in. “You have got to be kidding me,” she wrote, with an eyes emoji.
Speaking to reporters today, Trump did not rule out people in his administration using Signal again in the future. But he did not sound enthused about it, and POTUS (or “DJT,” or “47”) does not seem likely to join the app soon. “I don’t think it’s something we’re looking forward to using again,” the president said.